BROWN ISTS, a sect of English puritans of the 16th c., who took their doctrines and name from Robert Brown. In 1592, sir Walter Raleigh estimated their numbers at 20.000. Harsh measures suppressed them in England, or drove them out; but the exiles found refuge in Holland, where their church included a number of eminent men. Ere long they divided into Brownists and Separatists, and soon the Brownists gave place to the Independents, or Congregationalists. The Brownists objected not to the doctrine, but to the form of government of the English church, and to that of the Presbyterians as well. They would join no other reformed church on account of the toleration of unregenerate persons as members, with whom they held it impiety to he in Christian fellowship. They condemned the wedding service in church, bolding marriage to be a civil contract; refused the baptism of the children of those not church-members, or of -those who did not take sufficient care of their children already baptized, and rejected all forms of prayer, holding even that the Lord's prayer was presented as a model for imi tation, not for repetition. Their form of church government was democratic, all power residing in the brotherhood. The churches were severally independent; the minister of
one could not officiate in another. Lay brothers could prophesy or exhort, and it was usual after a sermon to question and discuss the topics broached. Every l3rownist church was a perfect body corporate, possessing full power over its own members and acts, and accountable to no other jurisdiction whatever. The principles of this sect, were those of a rude and extreme independency—the natural reaction from the ecclesi astical abuses of those times. Their leader, late in life, returned to the established church, becoming again a clergyman in it. His followers divided among themselves on some minor points of principle or of method, and the sect as a body came to nought. Yet those who favor " voluntaryism" in the church as against national establisment, and the sovereignty of the local congregation as against the consolidation of all the churches of some vast region, claim that the Brownist movement was the rough prophecy and heralding of a cardinal principle of polity then about to be restored to the church after ages of neglect.